The Alternative is Grad School
by Boosette
Summary: How Darcy "You Have Got To Be Kidding Me" Lewis was recruited to S.H.I.E.L.D., in a Starbucks.


Summer ends, and Darcy sneaks back to college like a good little girl, and promises Jane that she'll keep in touch and consider a change of major just to get out of the room in time to catch the bus to the plane that will remove her from New Mexico for the foreseeable future. She has almost enough of the right credits to pull a minor in bio, and none of the math she needs for physics. Her sole lonely physical science was environmental chemistry lecture without lab and by the way we are turning Earth into a cesspit, taken three years ago on too little sleep and passed by the skin of her teeth.

She thinks around the third week of September that this is what normal feels like for other people, and that it _shouldn't_ surprise her that it feels all kinds of weird for her now, but it does, and she spends more time in her suite (housing lottery jackpot, booyeah) dicking around on the game cube of her roommate's childhood than she does studying.

It ought to be easy, coming down off the adrenaline high and breathing again, operative word 'should' being a lying bastard not accounted for. And it's not even like it's a bad semester: intro to stats that she's put off for five years, French cinema, senior sem, intro to ethics because she didn't get grandfathered into the new curriculum that requires it when she switched majors _again_. SCUBA diving, may it never be forgotten. (No seriously, it was only advertised on a flyer in the second floor hallway between the math and social science departments, but it's worth three credits, meets once a week and satisfies the phys ed requirement she hasn't yet filled.)

_And_ they're stacked T-Th, the dream of every student who ever walked the hallowed halls of higher education.

And, okay, when you factor in the semester-long medical furlough she took because she got mono from sharing a fork with some guy whose real name she never even knew but he went by "Skeet", plus the change of schools when it became clear that six hours' drive was _way too close _to her family, she's only a year and a half behind. Walks in December. Piece of cake.

Which does nothing to explain how her search history is all Google Avengers and Google insert name of person she sortof knew in New Mexico here and Google Norse mythology than it is anything related to the stuff she's supposed to be learning. In way more hours research than she really wants to contemplate, she's found out that Agent Sitwell had gone to high school in Wyoming, graduated third in a class of ten, and not much else.

Apparently, some things change a person. Apparently, running around with Norse gods who are actually sentient alien life forms with magical technology and almost getting exploded by a giant flaming magical-mecha-tech robot that puts the animanga-based power fantasies of many an adolescent boy to shame is one of them.

She calls Jane the week after midterms, brain still reeling from a completely unnecessary academic bender had she spent even half as much time as she ordinarily does paying attention in class, doing the reading and writing the assignments. The number bounces her back to a S.H.I.E.L.D. minion, who informs her (rudely enough that she considers a strongly-worded email and rejects the idea for its futility), that she no longer has the security clearance necessary to talk to her friend without adult supervision.

"Well fuck you, too," she tells her snapped-closed cell phone, thrown unceremoniously down upon her rumpled, unmade bed. At some point she has got to learn to keep house like a real live adult, but today is not that day.

Agent Coulson is waiting for Darcy, sitting in _her_ seat at _her_ table in _her_ Starbucks in the library during off-peak Wednesday hours, paper coffee cup steaming on the table in front of him. He looks out of place only because he's wearing his suit and tie without one trace of irony and he's clearly too confident for the non-traditional student crowd.

"Thanks for the new iPod, by the way. Any reason the iTunes store isn't charging my card for new songs? Not that I'm complaining, but still. You people clearly have feelers in _Apple_. What next, the Goog?."

She sits down across from him without ordering, although her stomach rumbles in a way that would make Ivan Pavlov proud at the proximity to pumpkin cream cheese muffins and the season's first peppermint mochas.

"Unless you legally changed your name to 'You Have Got To Be Kidding Me,' you have a non-disclosure agreement to sign, Ms. Lewis."

"So it's payment for my silence."

After three o'clock Coulson drinks his coffee black decaf, one sugar. Darcy knows this because she made the run down to the slightly charred grocery market to pick up a bag once they reassembled all of Jane's toys but before she and Eric moved into the fancy new research facility at Avengers HQ in New York. She'd picked up a new coffee maker and a roll of orange duct tape to festoon the carafe with at the also slightly charred hardware store, too.

She figured, if you're going drink the devil's brew, you might as well avoid cross-contamination with all the high-octane nerd fuel that usually makes its way through their machine. Between Coulson and Jackson, she'd figured she's made friends for life after the first moderately gross pot in a temporary, interny, errand-monkey kind of way.

Coulson passes her a manila folder, stamped across the front with a redacted security clearness. Darcy raiseses a brow. Another, slimmer folder carrying a single sheet of paper slides across the table.

"An NDA for the actual NDA. What is this, I don't even." She deadpans it, mimicking the cadence of Hiccup's _thanks for nothing, you useless reptile_from How to Train Your Dragon.

"Although it wasn't difficult to track you down - you ought to vary your routine, Ms. Lewis; it only takes three days to arrange a kidnapping, without making it easier on the individuals scheduling it - we really ought not have had to."

"Okay, now you're being creepy."

Coulson produces a pen from seemingly nowhere and taps the NDA for the NDA with the click retractor end.

Darcy reads the paperwork, which is _thirty-seven pages long_, detailing every item and event she had witnessed or been party to in the weeks prior to Thor's exile to Midgard and the end of her internship and return to school in California. It has an _index_ and an _appendix_ and she reads through those, too.

She signs it. Because the whole ordeal pisses her off just a little, she signs her middle name as "You Have Got To Be Kidding Me" in the sixteen places that got the full signature and initials DYHGTBKML in twenty-three more.

There's another folder beneath the NDA: Smaller, slimmer, detailing her activities over the past semester, academic and job history, known skills and contacts as well as the job description and skills required for the position of administrative assistant with the Strategic Homeland Intervention, Enforcement and Logistics Division.

Darcy turns the page and reads _no fewer than three office suites including but not limited to Microsoft Office, Open Office and Apple iWork are required background skills. S.H.I.E.L.D. utilizes its own office suite and operating system_, before turning the page back and reading through the first half of it again.

And then the content and context clicks in her head in that way that happens when you put together three sides of a Rubik's cube in perfect harmony and then realize that the other three sides are still a hopelessly jumbled mess. Except so, so much better.

"You're offering me a job. _You guys_ are offering _me_ a _job_. You want me to be your office monkey. I'm being recruited to be office monkey for - "

"We require support staff, yes," Coulson cuts her off before she can announce anything to the entire library. "You require significantly less debriefing than our other candidates, have worked with our organization before, and should you continue on your current trajectory, will acquire your SCUBA certification on December thirteenth."

"That's what pushed me over the edge? The SCUBA diving?"

"You never know which skill set may come in useful on short notice."

"I just got recruited to be your office monkey, in a Starbucks, because I can SCUBA dive. I don't even think my brain can process how awesome that is."


End file.
